According to reports the group entered the high-end lingerie store in Georgetown, Washington, on Monday afternoon, distracting store employees before making off with products, ‘within seconds’ of entering, after co-ordinating the raid online. After the spate of robberies, other store managers in Georgetown, Washington, have expressed worry about the trend of ‘flashrobs’. The local police department believe the ‘flashrobs’ are planned on Facebook and Twitter, not long before they take place. The raiders enter stores filled with dumbfounded customers before blatantly stealing goods straight in front of store security cameras.

Lt John Hedgecock, from Washington D.C. Police, told Fox News: “They come in and they do it so fast – within a matter of seconds. What happened in this store probably lasted around 20 seconds. They go in, they distract the employees and they grab the merchandise, they are in and out. We have some information that they may be using some of the social media such as Facebook and Twitter to schedule an event if you will.”

Reports state that the robbery took place on Monday at around 2pm, where two men and two women entered the store with two baby strollers, while a small child distracted staff, allowing the theft to take place. The store owners said that the robbers showed no concern for store security, in fact they even ‘posed’ for the cameras in store, safe in the in the knowledge that the confusion of the flashrob means identifying them could be difficult.

Expert opinions on the brazen robbers state that they believe that young people get a rush from taking part in the ‘flashrobs’ and having the footage circulated in the media or on YouTube by police.

Scott Decker, Professor of Criminology at Arizona State University, told Fox News: “Young people are risk takers and seeing themselves on security videos uploaded on YouTube or the news can be a thrill to them.”

U.S blogger BirdAbroad who visited the store was convinced at first that it was a real store. Then she noticed that the signage said ‘Apple Store’ – and Steve Jobs’, something which would not be seen in a genuine official Apple store.

According to BirdAbroad, upon closer inspection, she noticed other things that weren’t quite right, she wrote on her blog: “The name tags around the necks of the friendly sales people didn’t actually have names on them – just an Apple logo and the anonymous designation ‘Staff’. Also, the stairs were poorly made and the walls hadn’t been painted properly. This was a total Apple store rip-off. A beautiful rip-off – a brilliant one – the best rip-off store we had ever seen. Even the salespeople genuinely thought they worked for Apple.”

BirdAbroad was convinced though that the products on sale looked genuine, even though they weren’t.

An Apple spokeswoman confirmed that BirdAbroad was absolutely correct, the store is a fake.

Stone is not the only member of the crew to be leaving, Evan Williams, who stepped down from the post last October and has also been acting as and ‘advisor’,’ has also notify the team that he is leaving completely and will be joining Stone in his work with The Obvious Group.  Many people would like to invest in the project, as Twitter is believed to be worth £4.9 billion and another other project like it would definitely be worth investing in!

Twitter will carry on regardless of the loss of Stone as the ever-so-popular (200 million registered accounts and 2,200 tweets ever second) does not want to disappoint its users.

A spokesman for West Yorkshire Police said today: “Police were called at 11.40am yesterday to reports of a man in the River Wharfe, apparently having fallen from the cliffs above. A Segway-style vehicle was recovered. He was pronounced dead at the scene. At this time we do not believe the death to be suspicious.”

Mr Heselden had bought Segway in December 2009, the machines which use gyroscopes to remain upright and are controlled by the direction in which the rider leans he recently became one of the UK’s most generous philanthropists, having given away £10 million to a charity foundation he set up in 2008. He had also in the past given £13 million to the same foundation which was the Leeds Community Foundation. Mr Heselden was worth £166 million and ranked 395th on the Sunday Times Rich List, which placed him above Simon Cowell.

Jimi Heselden, was once a miner by trade however, he made his fortune with Leeds-based defence company Hesco Bastion, which pioneered ‘blast walls’, the steel-mesh baskets that replaced sandbags as protection for soldiers on the frontline in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Picture courtesy of meuh !

The idea isn’t a new one, it has been in use in Norway and Sweden, and more recently in Paris to heat a public housing project.

According to Paris Habitat, they expect each passenger to give off around 100 watts in expended body heat – this, as well as the heat from the trains, keep their Metro station at temperatures between 14 and 20 degrees celcius.

The system uses geothermal engineering to move heat from underground to a heat exchanger, which then heats up water pipes allowing the water being pumped round to be heated.

According to estimates this would lead to a 33 percent reduction in carbon emissions in comparison to a normal boiler system.

Problems would only arise when there is a strike by Tube staff – which at the moment appears to be quite regular, so they may need some kind of backup system to allow for this inevitable problem.

They are considering implementing this for buildings around the London Underground stations by 2016, as part of a target to make all new buildings carbon zero.

During the 26 hour flight, heights of around 28,543 feet were reached, making it both the longest and highest flight performed by a solar powered plane. As the plane touched down assistants, who had helped to build the plane over the last 7 years, rushed to the plane (that weighs the weight of an average family car and has a wingspan of 207 ft) to make sure it was all still intact. The teams were thrilled as this now meant that they were one step closer to achieving their dream of a solar powered plane big enough for a full load of passengers to travel across the world through the night. The team aim to achieve this goal by 2013. Mr. Piccard quoted “It’s the first time ever that a (manned) solar airplane has flown through the night. That was the moment that proved the mission was successful, we made it.”

Picture courtesy of Deutsche Bank AG

Although this case has become a talking point across the internet and on many blogs and forums, with many critics blaming the woman for ignoring her own safety to follow directions blindly, Rosenberg’s lawyer Allen Young said the truth was different. The directions Ms Rosenberg downloaded to her phone in January gave directions from one end of Park City to the other however the Google Maps led her to a four-lane street without footpaths. According to the lawsuit filed by the California resident that route was “not reasonably safe for pedestrians.”

Ms Rosenberg states that she did believe she could reach a footpath on the other side of Deer Valley Drive, so she tried to cross the four-lane street however she did not reach the median because she was struck by a speeding car on a pitch-black night. Rosenberg received multiple bone fractures and she required six weeks of rehabilitation.

Her lawyer Mr Young said,” We think there’s enough fault to go around, but Google had some responsibility to direct people correctly or warn them, they created a trap with walking instructions that people rely on. She relied on it and thought she should cross the street.” He also states that Ms Rosenberg is seeking compensation for her medical bills as well as more for lost wages and punitive damages.

Spokesperson for Google, Elaine Filadelfo said “the company had not received a copy of the lawsuit and could not discuss it, but she disputed Mr Young’s assertion that Google Maps provides no warning that walking routes may be missing footpaths or pedestrian areas. Every software version for desktop computers and mobile devices has had that disclaimer since Google Maps was launched in 2008.”

The Park City police also stated that some segments of Deer Valley Drive have footpaths but not the stretch that Rosenberg reached. The street has a walking path on the side Ms Rosenberg failed to reach. Rosenberg’s lawyer said the walking path was “totally snowpacked” and of no use to pedestrians in January.

Picture courtesy of Yodel Anecdotal

Until fairly recently, the deaf were the forgotten users of the web. By contrast, great hullabaloos were made over the course of the last decade and a half about the needs of the visually impaired. Browser software began to enact zooming features and on-the-fly text-size alteration, and screen readers such as

If you’re looking for information about ‘accessibility’ for the internet then chances you’ll find that most information is about the needs of those with visual problems – closely followed by those with motor difficulties. As a result, there are a raft of conventions and technologies out there for anyone wishing to make their content accessible to the blind, and almost nothing about the deaf.

At first pass, you could be forgiven for thinking that the internet is actually the perfect medium for deaf people. Largely based on textual communication, there seemed to be little requirement to take into account the needs of the deaf.

But that was the old web. The web of usenet and forums and blogs. The web where the word was king. But today, streaming media has finally become reality. From YouTube to Spotify, Joost to Hulu, content is increasingly being served as audio and video. The attractions are manifest and obvious. We do our best communication face to face, and the nuances of extemporised speech make points in a way that only the best of writers can emulate in text. When Google decided to start answering questions from its users, the format it chose was spoken-to-camera video on their popular Webmasters YouTube channel. And when President Obama called Kanye a ‘jackass’ the story only really went into hyperdrive with the release of the audio which turned dry reportage into something real and immediate.

Suddenly, a new frontier in web accessibility is opening up – and the deaf are on the wrong side of that gulf.

Does the answer lie with the BBC?

Currently, there is very little in the way of provision for the deaf to interact with video content in particular. As video blogging takes off, the problem is only going to get greater. Whilst lip-reading on television or in person might be second nature to many deaf people, the relatively poor resolution of much video content makes it unclear how well this ability will help deaf listeners. And of course in the case where voiceover narration is used to contextualise the imagery, lip-reading will be no use at all.

Now the BBC has announced that it’s own in-house video player – the iPlayer – will be almost fully subtitled by the end of this year, with further improvements mooted for 2010. This includes live streaming content. The aim is ambitious, as the Beeb concede:

“Improved live subtitle synchronisation – live subtitles on iPlayer, at present, are based on those from broadcast TV and we are still working on ensuring that the time-lag between speech and subtitles, which is a limitation of the current live subtitling broadcast process and the current online repurposing process, is reduced as much as reasonably possible to improve the experience of watching live subtitles online”

Now this technology is proprietary and currently only available to UK television license payers who watch BBC TV, but an important watermark has been reached: it is technically feasible to bring video content to deaf people online.

Will this cross over into the mainstream and become an automated service on sites like YouTube? The answer is probably “yes”, but not for a long time. Deciphering audio into text has proven to be a very difficult hurdle for technologists to bridge, although there are plenty of companies developing solutions as we speak.

So while the gulf has finally been acknowledged, and technology is coming up to speed in some ways, but we are a long way from utopia. But with the weight of organisations like the BBC behind it, the solution is tantalisingly close to making a truly accessible web for all.